1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a household appliance driven by an electric motor, such as a slicing machine for food, having a housing with an electric-motor drive mounted therein as well as various switching and control elements controlling the operation and the speed of the drive and a tool such as circular blades or the like acted on by a drive.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In known household applicances of the type mentioned it is customary to construct the equipment for its electric-motor drive permanently built into the housing. In practice it was found that such appliances had a significant disadvantage in that the housing with built-in electric-motor drive can be wet cleaned only with the greatest caution and then only imperfectly. Indeed, it is impossible to wash the housing with the built-in electric-motor drive of the known household appliances properly by hand, and this applies even more emphatically to washing in a dishwasher.
If one wanted to alter the conventional appliances to enable them to be cleaned in a dishwasher, elaborate sealing measures would be required which would raise the cost of the known appliances enormously. In most of the known household appliances it is not possible to arrange the elements of the electric-motor drive in a watertight manner so that they can be safely washed because of the slots in the housing which are required for ventilating the motor.
Even though the food may not come into direct contact with the housing in some household appliances and occasional washing of the housing may not seem absolutely necessary, it has been found nevertheless that it would be highly desirable in the case of electric-motor-driven household slicers, which just recently have become increasingly popular in modern households, to completely wash them for hygienic reasons. This washing is particularly needed because, behind the circular blade and the section of the housing wall covered by it are cavities in which moist food residue wiped off the revolving blade collects. This moist food residue, protected from drying out, forms a nutrient medium for bacteria and mold.